Soren Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher who is known for his philosophical writings and quotes. Kierkegaard’s writings explore the nature of religious faith and the paradoxes of existentialism. Soren Kierkegaard quotes are often insightful and thought-provoking, and offer a unique perspective on life.
Soren Kierkegaard was born in Denmark in 1813 to a devoutly religious family. After a period of intense religious study, Kierkegaard became a Christian philosopher and theologian, whose work has been influential in Protestant theology and existentialism. Kierkegaard’s life was characterized by a deep inner struggle, and his writings are marked by a philosophical and religious intensity. He died in 1855.
In 1844, Kierkegaard published his first book, “The Concept of Anxiety.” This work was an attempt to explain the human condition, and in it, Kierkegaard drew upon his own experiences and on the writings of other philosophers. The book was well-received, and Kierkegaard went on to publish a number of other works, including “The Sickness Unto Death,” “Fear and Trembling,” and “The Present Age.”
Kierkegaard’s writings were controversial, and they were often met with criticism from other philosophers. However, they have come to be regarded as some of the most important philosophical works of the nineteenth century.
Kierkegaard was a unique thinker whose work cannot be easily categorized. He was, however, a proponent of the idea that Christianity should be relevant to everyday life and that the truths of the faith should be made accessible to everyone.
He believed that the Christian faith should be lived out in an authentic and passionate way, and that it is possible to find joy and meaning in life through a relationship with God. Kierkegaard’s legacy is one of creative engagement with the world and a passionate commitment to truth.
If you’re looking for some thought-provoking wisdom, then you should check out some of Soren Kierkegaard quotes.
53 Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
- “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”
2. “The most common form of despair is not being who you are.”
3. “Hope is a passion for the possible.”
4. “The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.”
5. “If anyone on the verge of action should judge himself according to the outcome, he would never begin.”
6. “You become what you understand.”
7. “Boredom is the root of all evil – the despairing refusal to be oneself.”
8. “Happiness is the greatest hiding place for despair.”
9. “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”
10. “To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.”
Soren Kierkegaard Quotes on Life
11. “Many of us pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that we hurry past it.”
12. “It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.”
13. “It is impossible to exist without passion”
14. “People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”
15. “The proud person always wants to do the right thing, the great thing. But because he wants to do it in his own strength, he is fighting not with man, but with God.”
16. “It is very important in life to know when your cue comes.”
17. “Only the noble of heart are called to difficulty.”
18. “Faith begins precisely where thinking leaves off.”
19. “The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you’ll never have.”
20. “If you want to be loathsome to God, just run with the herd.”
Famous Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
21. “Nothing is as heady as the wine of possibility”
22. “It is so hard to believe because it is so hard to obey.”
23. “Once you are born in this world you’re old enough to die.”
24. “Don’t forget to love yourself.”
25. “God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners.”
26. “What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?”
27. “To be lost in spiritlessness is the most terrible thing of all.”
28. “The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.”
29. “The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived.”
30. “It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.”
Thought-Provoking Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
31. “For it is not what happens to me that makes me great, but it is what I do.”
32. “There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.”
33. “Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.”
34. “The self-assured believer is a greater sinner in the eyes of God than the troubled disbeliever.”
35. “The only intelligent tactical response to life’s horror is to laugh defiantly at it”
36. “What is existence for but to be laughed at if men in their twenties have already attained the utmost?”
37. “To cheat oneself out of love is the most terrible deception; it is an eternal loss for which there is no reparation, either in time or in eternity.”
38. “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
39. “Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living.”
40. “Faith is the highest passion in a human being. Many in every generation may not come that far, but none comes further.”
41. “People understand me so little that they do not even understand when I complain of being misunderstood.”
42. “People understand me so poorly that they don’t even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.”
43. “People settle for a level of despair they can tolerate and call it happiness.”
44. “It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand.”
45. “I stick my finger into existence and it smells of nothing.”
46. “Life can only be understood going backward, but must be lived going forward.”
47. “It is a frightful satire and an epigram on the modern age that the only use it knows for solitude is to make it a punishment, a jail sentence.”
48. “No, not one shall be forgotten who was great in the world. But each was great in his own way, and each in proportion to the greatness of that which he loved.”
49. “What looks like politics, and imagines itself to be political, will one day unmask itself as a religious movement.”
50. “Language has time as its element; all other media have space as their element.”
51. “I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this.”
52. “Faith is the highest passion in a man.”
53. “My time I divide as follows: the one half I sleep; the other half I dream. I never dream when I sleep; that would be a shame, because to sleep is the height of genius.”